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Jeremy Corbyn addresses the crowd at Glastonbury
‘After a decade of austerity politics, Jeremy Corbyn came to represent a genuine alternative to the status quo.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
‘After a decade of austerity politics, Jeremy Corbyn came to represent a genuine alternative to the status quo.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

It's not party structure preventing people joining Labor – it's ideas

This article is more than 6 years old

Jeremy Corbyn offered policies that broke orthodoxies – and people flocked to vote for him

Speaking to the Fabian Society earlier this week Labor’s national president, Mark Butler, made an impassioned plea for party reform. Lambasting “self-appointed factional warlords” and their “back-room buffoonery”, he called for ordinary members to be empowered to vote for all important party positions, and in the pre-selections of Senate and Legislative Council candidates. Greater member involvement, and the creation of a new category of registered supporters, he argued, would make the party more representative of the Australian electorate, and facilitate further participation.

This is Butler’s response to the challenges of 21st century politics: growing cynicism, splintering electorates, and the rise of minor-party challengers. He argues that respect “for the major parties is running at historically low levels. And that’s not a lack of respect for our ideas and our policies – it’s a lack of respect for our party organisation.”

While Butler’s colourful invective towards the powerful factional leaders of the party has captured attention (and led to some awkward questions for Bill Shorten), just as interesting is the example of reform he put forward. Though he takes care to differentiate himself from its “radical left leader”, it is British Labour under Jeremy Corbyn that serves as his model for change.

Butler lauds British Labour’s progress since 2015, the first leadership election it held under its new member-led model. Whereas previously the party leader was elected through a complicated college system, from 2015 individual members and registered supporters were empowered to decide who would lead Labour. This resulted in half a million people voting for the Labour party’s leader in 2016 (compared to the 30,000 who voted in Labor’s first experiment in membership voting in 2013).

Since then, British Labour has seen a palpable growth in membership and activism: constituency parties are overflowing with activists, membership exceeds 500,000, and the party is attracting a youthful constituency many felt were lost. At the 2017 British election, Labour gained its largest swing of votes since the epochal election of 1945, even if it fell short of government.

While this may appear a compelling case for change, there is danger in this analogy, a danger of missing the wood for the trees.

This upsurge of enthusiasm for British Labour was not driven by changes in the party’s voting procedures. People did not flock to British Labour in the thousands, and then the tens of thousands, because they had a vote. It was because they believed they had something worth voting for.

After a decade of austerity politics, Jeremy Corbyn came to represent a genuine alternative to the status quo. Whether or not you agree with his politics, it is clear that he represents a break from the orthodoxies of government that have dominated the past decades, orthodoxies associated now with the degeneration of public services, the diminishing of opportunities for advancement, and growing inequality.

Corbyn’s Labour was willing to offer a unified worldview of how things could be managed differently, its manifesto related to those aggrieved by the inequity of British society. Much of this energy was directed by Momentum, a radical network of activists whose commitment to expanding membership-led democracy in Labour is twinned with its desire for a government that “redistributes wealth and power from the few to the many”.

The success of British Labour, and its ability to draw new layers of activists and supporters into its orbit, is based upon this capacity and willingness to present itself as a genuine alternative to the Conservative party, and the status quo it represents. It was new ideas of how Britain could be run that transformed Labour.

Since the defeat of Paul Keating in 1996 Labor has lost its ability to develop and articulate a big-picture vision for Australia that starkly differentiates it from the status quo. While in that time it has instituted significant and important policies, it has not developed a broader vision that clarifies its meaning and purpose in the twenty-first century. Bringing people to the party requires this kind of big thinking.

What Butler misses is that people will not come to Labor because they can vote in its elections, or choose who will sit in the Legislative Council. They will come to Labor if the party will give them something to come back for. It is this reform, of ideas, that is the true challenge, and opportunity, for Labor. Its neglect is a deficiency that no structural reform can correct.

  • Dr Liam Byrne is a historian of the Australian Labor party

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